“... The Ancient Paths was not so revolutionary. It belongs squarely to a tradition dating back to John Toland’s History of the Druids. Toland, who seems to have invented the term ‘pantheism’, believed he had uncovered ‘the philosophy of the Druids concerning the Gods, human souls, Nature in general and in particular the Heavenly Bodies’, but died ...”

“... turned up in 1974, and kept Christopher both amused and busy translating his poetry into English. John Silber, who later became a reactionary megalomaniac (first as president of Boston University and then as failed gubernatorial candidate), was at that point a brilliant and progressive dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, also brought in by Ransom. The ...”

“... fact: the mind prefers narratives to numbers.Kahneman and Tversky’s research began to have a major impact outside psychology after the publication in 1979 of their work on ‘prospect theory’. There they argued that people were more concerned with change than with current states – with gaining and losing money rather than having a particular level of ...”

“... striking departure from conventional fiction writing is Quin’s use of quotation, which becomes a major, if invisible strand in Tripticks but appears first in Three when S writes, ‘All afternoon surrounded, exchanging newspapers. I came across the following …’ and follows it with two pages of almost verbatim quotation from a 1966 article about the ...”

“... or literature in society’. And a decade ago, when controversy over the curriculum was at a peak, John Guillory added that debates about literary and artistic canons merely disguised the simple fact that they weren’t very important to anyone’s self-fashioning. By the late 1990s the humanities appeared marginal even to the universities, driven as they were ...”

“... precedence. ‘His Lordship affected more aristocracy than befitted his years or the occasion,’ John Galt thought, and Hazlitt agreed: ‘He may affect the principles of equality, but he resumes his privilege of peerage, upon occasion.’ Gilmour is nearer the mark to see in Byron’s touchiness and bumptiousness not the toff reverting to type, but rather a ...”

“... and carefully observed trashy language: ‘I see a fleet of Jeeps, pick-ups, and 4WDs bearing major Halogen light-show action, plus Skye’s Wagoonmobile (her mother’s rusted AMC Matador sloppily painted with daisies, peace signs, and pine trees and the license plate LIVED B4) and Harmony’s Celica PRV, beating us here from the gym (the Princess ...”

“... the failure to conclude an agreement as the ‘greatest disappointment’ of his administration. John Kennedy came closest to success when the Limited Test Ban Treaty came into force on 10 October 1963, just a few weeks before his assassination, though that treaty, which prohibited nuclear tests in the oceans, atmosphere and space, did not prohibit ...”

“... often indulged friends or relatives. (Play It as It Lays was scripted by Dominick’s brother, John Gregory Dunne, and his wife, Joan Didion, and was an adaptation of Didion’s warning novel on Hollywood.) But he threw parties, and for a few years real class people came, and he took their pictures. He hadn’t set out to be a studied photographer, but he ...”

“... This dogged admiration for the public sector is an important fact of British life and has major electoral consequences: the Conservative Party paid a heavy price for its alienation of the public sector and its professional employees, and the Labour Party seems set to do exactly the same. Equally dangerous are the Government’s assumptions about the ...”

“... End, especially Oxford Street and its environs, into a retail centre that made urban shopping a major leisure activity for women. The rise of modern shopping opened the city streets to respectable women, and played a significant role in both feminism and consumer culture. Although the study of British retailing is, as she explains, a flourishing academic ...”

“... When Major Henry committed suicide, Proust wrote that the Dreyfus Affair, hitherto pure Balzac, had become Shakespearean. While the Iraq affair obviously differs from Dreyfus, we can see what Proust meant. Yet the Iraq crisis had been unfolding before Dr David Kelly’s death – whatever Lord Justice Hutton’s inquiry concludes – and the sense that Iraq did not cause but nevertheless represents a crisis of the Labour Party has been with us for months now ...”

“... resource. Blackwood’s Lady-Carolineness, her unhappy childhood, busy sex life, connections to major figures in art and literature, and gaudy drinking does make her a toothsome subject. As she must have realised. Schoenberger was suggested to Blackwood, by then living on Long Island, when she said she was looking for a biographer. They spoke on the ...”

“... were few. Palaeontologists and geologists now generally agree that the Earth has endured five major extinctions, and more than a dozen lesser ones. The first took place 450 million years ago, during the late Ordovician period, and the most lethal 200 million years later, during the Permian-Triassic – ‘the great dying’, when nine out of ten marine ...”

“... and imitated ‘superior’ Italian humanism. In this she is following the lead of the late John Hale, whose last book, The Civilisation of Europe in the Renaissance, let the Danube School of artists, Lucas Cranach and Albrecht Altdorfer, share space with Leonardo et al. Rublack’s quest has taken her to fascinating primary sources in German ...”